Amazon's dark patterns around cancelling Prime membership left such a disgusting taste in my mouth that I swore the company off. Nasty.<p>This was some years ago but I decided it wasn't worth the cost for me so I went inside my settings to cancel. Their stipulations for cancelling the membership were "Come back 2 days before the account is set to auto-renew and cancel then." Excuse me? That was in like 6 months. Can't remove the credit card. Can't ask them to just stop auto charging.<p>I set about 40 calendar reminders and cancelled at 12:01am 2 days before auto renew and then nuked my Amazon account.<p>Dark patterns. Dark heart.
Cancelled Prime some years ago (customer since the very beginning).<p>Now I need to find the (small) no-prime link every time when checking out - between many prime links.<p>Amazon tells me 10 days delivery if I don't use prime. Then after ordering it becomes 8 days, then 5 days, then 3 days.<p>(Main reason to cancel, I mostly got/get used items for full price)
I was actually pleasantly surprised by Prime cancellation recently. I bought a gift for a friend on Amazon US (I’m based in the UK), and accepted the trial of Prime to get the shipping free. I forgot to cancel it until they charged me. But a few days after the charge when I cancelled they had an option to be refunded for the month I’d accidentally paid for, which was a pleasant surprise.
Well, I tried it after reading the article, and currently it is very intuitive to cancel your Prime membership:<p>- Clicked the "Hello, Your Account & Lists" button on the home page<p>- Clicked the "Prime" button<p>- There is a big link that says "Update, cancel, and more..." there<p>The article says that they changed the UI in April. Maybe it was worse before.
I actually feel embarrassed for Amazon when I'm trying to checkout and can see all the deceptive tricks they implement to make you sign up. This is one of the richest companies in the world acting like dodgy internet scammers.<p>Good to see this is finally catching up with them in some way.
I recently had a thought provoking conversation with a carpenter near me: he told me that Amazon (and other online storefronts) have completely warped consumers' expectations around furniture, from grossly overpaying for cheap pieces to normalizing a materially worse customer experience (paying for the "privilege" of expedited delivery, when any honest local store will do a same-day dropoff for free or a nominal fee).<p>I haven't bought anything from Amazon for years, and my experience has been that this applies to nearly everything that I would have bought from them: buying it locally is cheaper, faster, with a better guarantee of quality, <i>and</i> with a human being (including often the manufacturer) on the other end.
A smaller entity would not survive the reputational damage, Amazon will just shrug, "manage the damage" and move on. This is what letting corporate entities become too big does to market discipline: it annihilates it.
Last time i used Amazon, they dynamically altered the shipping costs to be just above the cost of a month of prime (which would give me free shipping). Whether it was because I was once a Prime member or not, it felt so slimey.
I have stopped paying for prime years ago.<p>I regularly get a free 1 month trial that I accept and immediately cancel. When my trial expires, I wait until I get a new one. In the meantime I order without prime and still usually get my stuff in less than 2 days.
Forget about being duped into free trials that aren't easily canceled. Think about what it actually means for a company to commit to getting you nearly anything, anywhere in 2 days.<p>We may enjoy arguing about plastic straws and grocery bags but that's nothing compared to the resources needed to pull off prime shipping.
Related Article & thread from yesterday:<p>> FTC sues Amazon over ‘deceptive’ Prime sign-up and cancellation process<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36418713">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36418713</a><p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/21/ftc-sues-amazon-over-deceptive-prime-sign-up-and-cancellation-process.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/21/ftc-sues-amazon-over-decepti...</a><p>The actual court document can be seen here: <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.323520/gov.uscourts.wawd.323520.1.0_1.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.32...</a>
I have to admit that those dark patterns on Amazon already saved me a good amount of money. For every order, I have to confirm that I don't want Prime (an estimated) 3 times now. Usually between the second and third click I'm reminded that I should shop around and to look for a better deal elsewhere (and usually there is one).<p>In that sense, thanks for your greed, Jeff.
I got prime a few times, just to get the free shipping, then cancelled right after.
Now when I click prime, it just says something went wrong. Looks to me like u can get on a list.
I don’t find Prime hard to cancel but I do agree that certain patterns are crafty. Like when I go to buy a single Kindle book and it defaults to their subscription service (Kindle Unlimited). With 1-click purchase, it’s too easy to buy and not know.
Amazon Prime is definitely hard to cancel, but I had a pleasant customer support experience at least.<p>A few years ago I came to realise I had left my monthly Prime subscription active for a whole year when I thought I had cancelled it.<p>Once I realised, I cancelled it and asked Amazon support if I could possibly get a refund; they granted it the next day after confirming I hadn't bought anything or watched Prime Video in that time.<p>I'm very careful to make sure I cancel Prime when I'm done with it now. It bothers me that they don't send an email receipt or anything every time you're billed.
Interesting, I complained to the California AG about not being able to cancel the auto renew in 2019.<p>Got this great line from Amazon customer service:<p>"Unfortunately, currently we don't have an option to turn off the prime membership. However you can turn off your prime membership in your Account (www.amazon.com/your-account). Just click "Manage Prime Membership" under "Settings," and click the "Do not continue" link."<p>FWIW the "Do not continue" thing didn't seem to actually exist. I had to wait for the renewal to happen then cancel after.
So I just cancelled my Prime membership to see how hard it is, and because cancelling subscriptions before they expire is a good idea anyway. I often get better offers just by doing this. I will very likely re-subscribe though. Here's what I did:<p>1) Select "Your Prime Membership" from the "Account & Lists" menu on the Amazon homepage. It's not hard to find and not in a surprising place.<p>2) At the top of that page is a menu titled "Manage Membership - update cancel and more". The dropdown contains a link saying "End Membership". They also warn right there "By ending your membership you will lose access to your Prime benefits." without telling me that I'm not actually going to lose any benefits until the end of the membership period. That's a very popular dark pattern. They clearly want me to wait until the last moment and then forget to cancel. On the other hand, they do send a reminder.<p>3) Clicking "End Membership" brings me to a page listing all my Prime benefits with a big button at the top saying "Use your benefits today". At the bottom of the page are three buttons, "Keep membership", "See More Plans" and "Continue to cancel". Continuing to cancel...<p>4) Now I'm on a page with a big fat headline saying "Please confirm your Prime membership cancellation" and a prominently highlighted button saying "End on 15 July 2023" next to a gray button saying "Keep Membership". Now they're finally letting me know when my membership benefits will end. Clicking this button actually cancels the membership.<p>So this is one unnecessary step and one annoying dark pattern (plus a few more subtle ones). It's not egregious. I would say it's slightly better than average.
The FTC needs to look into Amazon's practice of raising the price of goods the rough amount, for Prime members, which it ostensibly is supposed to be saving them on shipping.<p>More and more it is looking like Prime isn't much more than a streaming subscription and a single discount day. Unless there is some niche benefit that a relatively rare person is specifically keyed into.
As a UK-based Amazon customer, these dark patterns are getting out of control. They keep swapping interfaces every few days, and they are becoming increasingly complex. Now you have to de-select "use the remaining balance in my gift cards to pay for prime" <i>every time</i> you checkout. The you have to select a non-obvious button to not get fast delivery (otherwise enable prime). You then have to go through all of the orders in the checkout and ensure that the "free" option is selected.<p>That, plus they keep pushing this subscription service for repeat purchases, meaning that can slowly creep the prices of everything up and not notify you. They also now display prices as if you are subscribed, not the actual one-off purchase.
I saw this on my account actually! One day I was a family user on my brother's plan, the next I was a prime subscriber without my consent, using my payment method on file. I reached out to class action lawyers but no one responded. Really good to see the FTC taking action.
I have written my congressman and my state representative multiple times in two states, asking them to sponsor a bill to address this. The basic idea I have is that it should be illegal for an unsubscribe or cancellation process to take more time or effort or a different communication channel than its subscription process, and that the process to cancel must be easily discoverable. The fine would be way in excess of the value of a typical subscription, eg maybe $1000 or so per occurrence. This would also be an individual cause of action, meaning that, if you encountered this, you could take them to small claims court.<p>So far I have gotten a lot of positive noises but no action.
A friend of mine once found she'd somehow managed to sign up for Prime in America despite already being a Prime member in the UK. She only noticed 6 months later. Got her money back though. To this day she still can't work out how it happened.
I can successfully say I never enrolled in Prime. I always thought the dark patterns around it were deceptive and deceitful - unfortunately they've gotten away with it for so long and bilked so many people and padded their forward accounting statements for so long with this revenue that I doubt any fine from the FTC has any real teeth to stop them from doing it again.
Tangentially related: <a href="https://scribe.rip/view-a-sku-32721d623aee" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://scribe.rip/view-a-sku-32721d623aee</a><p>"... what if buying local was as easy as shopping at Amazon? What if you could buy local while shopping on Amazon?"
There needs to be better regulations around subscriptions. If you don’t use a subscription for 3 months you should be offered an unsubscribe link in your email that isn’t some convoluted set of dark patterns and often phone calls!
Me too, I signed up "for free" to get faster a package that ended up coming later than originally, went ahead to forget about it and caught it while I had been charged 3 months.
Does anybody have a good alternative to Amazon? I'm lazy and would like an online shop that sells everything under the sun, but is more trustworthy and with fewer moral failings.
Love prime, has changed my life in Japan with easy access to just about anything delivered the next day, particularly things which are hard to come by here. Movie selection is good too.
"To cancel Prime, consumers had to... locate the "manage membership" page and press a button labeled "End Membership"... then move through multiple steps."<p>the horror! pressing an "end membership button"? moving through <i>multiple steps</i>??<p>i've cancelled a prime membership before. it's not that bad. why are we making consumer protection into a joke with this nonsense. feels like FTC is looking for any chance to go after a bigcorp that plays well in news headlines.